Since the Enlightenment, Europe has been the birthplace of the concept of human social progress. Equality, freedom, civil rights, social contract, social welfare... These ideas of social progress, which originated in Europe, have become a global consensus. The "Social Quality Theory", which emerged in the late 90s of the 20th century, is a new vision in the past 20 years. On June 10, 1997, at the European Conference held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1,000 European scientists signed and issued the Amsterdam Declaration on the Quality of European Society 5028955 (hereinafter referred to as the Declaration). The declaration, which is less than 1,000 words, expresses the "European dream" of the EU member states: we want European society to be one that is economically successful, but also one that promotes social justice and social participation for all its citizens. This will make Europe a society where social quality is paramount. European citizens can and are required to participate in the social and economic life of their communities in order to enhance their well-being, their personal potential and the welfare of their communities. To be able to participate, citizens need to achieve an acceptable level of economic security and social inclusion, live in a cohesive community, and have the right to develop their full potential. In other words, the quality of society depends on the extent to which all European citizens enjoy the economic, social and political citizenship rights of their communities. In a globalized economy, competition should go hand in hand with the promotion of social cohesion and the realization of the full potential of every European citizen. The concept of social quality has been born in the historical background of the European integration process for decades. The Second World War shattered the mountains and rivers of the European countries and left everything in ruins. Shortly after the war, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill proposed the establishment of the "United States of Europe", which led to the idea of European unification. In 1949, the "Council of Europe" established by the 10 Western and Northern European countries substantially launched the European integration process. In the 50s and 60s of the 20th century, the transnational cooperation mechanisms of Western European countries such as the "European Coal and Steel Community", "European Economic Community" and "European Atomic Energy Community" came out one after another, and until the signing of the Brussels Treaty in 1965, the European Community (European Communities) was officially established. During the Cold War, the European Community, the United States and the Soviet Union together formed the three major forces of the "First World" and played an important role in the world political pattern. The adoption of the Maastricht Treaty by the member states of the European Community in December 1991 and its entry into force on 1 November 1993 marked the official birth of the European Union, marking the culmination of the European integration process: from economic cooperation to all-round substantive economic and political association. What kind of European society will the EU – an integrated Europe – represent? The consensus among EU politicians and academics is that there is a "European Social Model" (ESM) where the quality of society is paramount. In this development model, social quality is defined as "the extent to which people are able to participate in the social and economic life of a community while enhancing their well-being and personal potential", specifically, the level of socio-economic security, social inclusion, social cohesion and autonomy or empowerment. From this, we can see that the concept of social quality is at the core of the values of the European social model. The concept of social quality reflects the multi-level reflection of EU members on the development model in the process of European integration. First, the concept of social quality is a confrontation with the "rightward shift" of European society driven by the neoliberal policy promoted by Thatcherism in the 80s of the 20th century, with privatization, tax cuts, deregulation, encouraging competition, and weakening trade unions as specific measures. Social quality theory takes "sustainable welfare society" as its development prospect. Second, the concept of social quality is an advocacy of a European social model different from the American model. Since World War II, the U.S. development model has placed too much emphasis on economic growth and market supremacy, while traditional European values have focused more on social justice, social inclusion and social solidarity. The development path with European characteristics should be guided by the concept of civil rights and social justice, and should be different from the development model of the United States with liberalism as the purpose. Third, the concept of social quality is the result of the integration of pluralistic institutions and cultures in the process of European integration. From the EC to the EU, the number of Member States joining the integration process has gradually increased. The disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the transformation of former socialist countries in Eastern Europe have also led to the continuous expansion of the EU to the east; The issuance of the euro and the opening of borders between member states have enhanced the movement of people and communities within the EU. The integration of economy, politics and culture requires an integrated Europe to share common values and coherent social policies. It can be seen from the above that the proposal of the concept of social quality is not limited to the category of pure scholarship, but has a very clear social policy application orientation. Its key function is to "aim both to serve as a standard by which citizens assess the effectiveness of national and European policies, and as the scientific basis for policy formulation." In view of this, experts and scholars of the European Commission have gradually developed and structured the 12 conditions of social quality in the Declaration into 4 dimensions, 18 fields, 49 sub-fields and 91 indicators, 5028956 the "European Social Quality Indicator System". Although as early as the late 80s of the 20th century, domestic scholars used the concept of "social quality" to carry out academic research, but the content involved was not related to the "social quality theory" advocated by the European Union. Around 2007, social quality theories, index systems, and research paradigms from Europe were introduced into Chinese academia. The detailed process can be found in the fifth section of the first chapter of this book, and the author will not repeat it here. In the past 12 years, the research on social quality in China has progressed rapidly, and it has entered the stage of setting social policy issues from the stage of academic translation and theoretical discussion. From the perspective of research scope, it has also expanded from scattered, local empirical research to large-scale academic investigation nationwide. A theoretical system from a foreign land can be absorbed so quickly by the domestic academic circles and open up a field from theory to empirical research to the application of social policy, which is rare in the field of social science research in recent years. If you try to explore the cause, it may be more appropriate to interpret it with the ancient adage "the stone of the other mountain, you can attack the jade". First, the concept of common prosperity and development contained in China's reform and opening up goals and the orientation of social quality theory to suppress market supremacy are consistent. Using market mechanisms to promote economic growth will inevitably lead to polarization in the pattern of income distribution. In this regard, the Chinese government has been advocating the development concept of getting rich first, driving prosperity later, and eventually achieving common prosperity. As early as 13 December 1978, at the closing ceremony of the CPC Central Work Conference, Comrade Deng Xiaoping pointed out in his famous speech entitled "Emancipating the Mind, Seeking Truth from Facts, and Looking Forward in Unity and Unity": "In terms of economic policy, I believe that we should allow some regions, some enterprises, and some workers and peasants to earn more and live better first because of their hard work and achievements." When some people's lives get better first, they will inevitably produce great demonstration power, influence their neighbors, and drive people in other areas and other units to learn from them. In this way, the entire national economy will continue to develop in waves, and the people of all ethnic groups throughout the country will be able to become prosperous relatively quickly. In 50289571984, the Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Economic System Reform was officially put forward for the first time in the form of a document of the Party Central Committee: "Only by allowing and encouraging some regions, some enterprises and some people to rely on hard work to get rich first can we have a strong attraction and encouragement effect on the majority of people, and drive more and more people to prosperity wave after wave." 5028958 It can be seen that in the early days of reform and opening up, common prosperity became one of the ultimate goals of the ruling party in the direction of social equity. Since then, successive party congresses and governments have taken common prosperity as the core governing philosophy. In the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, General Secretary Xi Jinping once again pointed out that our party adheres to the people-centered development thinking and constantly promotes the all-round development of people and the common prosperity of all the people. The idea of persevering in seeking common prosperity for all people and realizing social fairness and justice is highly consistent with the European social quality theory and policy, and the advocacy of developing social protection and promoting social justice with extensive economic social security. Second, China's reform and opening up has entered the stage of sharing results from economic growth, and the social values of fairness and justice have become the core needs of the public. China's total GDP surpassed Germany and Japan in 2008 and 2012 respectively to become the world's second largest economy, with a total GDP of more than 90 trillion yuan in 2018, or $13.6 trillion, which is close to two-thirds of the total US economy in the same period. The contribution rate of final consumption expenditure to GDP growth increased from 38.3% in 1978 to 58.8% in 2017, an increase of 20.5 percentage points in 40 years; the Engel coefficient of urban and rural residents in the same period decreased by 28.9 and 36.5 percentage points respectively compared with 1978; the consumption domestic demand, which has been difficult to boost for a long time, was released and satisfied under the Internet economy, between 2014 and 2107. The online retail sales of physical goods were 5,480.6 billion yuan, with an average annual growth rate of about 30% 5028959. In the era of mass consumption, the public is not only satisfied with the enjoyment of daily necessities and services, but also inevitably puts forward requirements for the universal distribution of public services and social welfare in the fields of employment, education, medical care, social security, etc., and the corresponding concept of social justice has received more and more attention. According to the data from the 2013 Comprehensive Survey of China's Social Conditions (CSS2013), the concepts of equality, democracy, and justice are ranked at the forefront of the values that the public believes a good society should have. In the CSS2017 survey, nearly 3/4 of the public believed that "social security is the responsibility of the government and should not be borne by ordinary people", indicating that the concept of welfare rights has been formed, which has become the "rigid need" of the public and is the core obligation of the government to the people. In such an era background, the advocacy of social justice and social welfare in Europe's "social quality concept" has been particularly favored by Chinese academic circles. Third, since the reform and opening up, China is in the process of continuous differentiation of social group interests, and needs the values of social cohesion and social tolerance to promote the re-engineering of social group relations. At the beginning of reform and opening up, China's social class structure was often referred to as "two major classes" (that is, the working class, the peasant class and the intellectual class). After 40 years of industrialization, marketization, and urbanization, occupational status has continued to diverge, and the new social class form has become more complex than the era of the planning system. Twenty years ago, Mr. Lu Xueyi presided over the topic of "Research on Contemporary Social Classes in China", which proposed that society has been divided into ten major strata 5028960 in the past 20 years after the reform and opening up. Since the second decade of the 21st century, China has taken on new characteristics of phased development. The first is the decline of the urban-rural dual pattern marked by the urbanization rate exceeding 50% in 2011, the second is the industrial upgrading brought about by China's entry into the late stage of industrialization in 2015 (some scholars say that China has entered the post-industrial era), the third is the new wealth creation caused by the boom of the Internet economy, and the fourth is the convenience of social communication created by mobile Internet communication technology, which has a non-negligible impact on China's social class differentiation. The middle class represented by white-collar workers and the middle-income group with urban migrant workers as the main body are growing day by day, "new social groups" have begun to emerge, subcultural groups of young generations such as "ant tribes", "bee tribes", and small-town youth have taken the stage, and the accumulation of social wealth in the past 40 years has also been reflected in intergenerational inheritance, and the phenomenon of class solidification has also made "second generation X" a topic of great concern in society. At the same time, the interest relations of social groups are more complicated, social value orientations are more diverse, and the fans of social core values also present differences between generations, between urban and rural areas, and between elites and grassroots. Throughout the 70 years of the Republic, there has never been a diverse group of groups, multiple interests, multi-dimensional values, and multiple voices in today's society. The integration of a pluralistic society must rely on the social value principles and social behavior rules of mutual respect, mutual trust, mutual assistance and compatibility that are accepted and followed by the vast number of members of society. From this point of view, the ethics of collective priority adhered to by the European social quality theory, and the concept of social cohesion and social inclusion emphasized are precisely what needs to be learned from in China's social development today. To sum up, Chinese scholars believe that although the theory of social quality comes from Europe, it is related to many major issues of China's current social development, and is highly consistent with the value orientation of "prosperous, strong, democratic, civilized and harmonious" emphasized by the comprehensive construction of a moderately prosperous society, and this theory is also a new paradigm of social development theory. Third, the Sinicization of social quality research and the absorption of European social quality theory do not mean that it is necessarily feasible to measure China's social development with the theory and index system of social quality. Extraterritorial oranges, settled in China, need to carry out a lot of research on localization transformation at the academic level. Since about 2010, domestic scholars such as Linka, Zhang Haidong, Han Keqing, Wang Xing, etc. have conducted extensive and in-depth discussions on how to combine Western social quality theory with China's social transformation and the construction of a harmonious society, including different aspects of re-theoretical orientation, policy alignment, and index determination (see Chapter 1, Section 5 of this book). In his article "The Prototype of Social Quality Theory and Its Applicability to Asian Society", Professor Rinca proposed how to remove social quality theory from the background in the European context and make it a cross-social and cross-cultural universal policy analysis tool 5028961, which is of great guiding significance for the localization of social quality research. At the same time, domestic researchers have also launched a series of social surveys on the theme of social quality. The first is an exploratory survey of a single city. For example, in 2009, the social quality survey team led by Professor Lin Ka of Zhejiang University conducted a survey of enterprise employees and a resident survey conducted in Hangzhou in 2011; From 2010 to 2013, the social quality team of Zhang Haidong and other scholars of Shanghai University conducted two "Shanghai Social Quality Surveys", and published "Shanghai Social Quality Research 2010-2013", which is a more systematic research result of social quality survey for a single city. Since then, the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Shanghai University have carried out the "2016 Shanghai Social Quality Survey"; The rest include a survey conducted by Xu Yanhui and others at Xiamen University in Shenzhen and Xiamen in 2011; In 2012, Xu Yun and others also conducted a similar investigation in Nanjing's Gulou District. The second type is a regional survey. For example, from August 2012 to May 2013, the Shanghai University team conducted a large-scale questionnaire survey in six provinces and cities in Shanghai, Guangdong, Jilin, Henan, Gansu and Yunnan, collecting a total of 5745 valid sample data. Based on this survey, the "2013 Survey Report on Social Quality in Six Cities in China" was published in the "Social Blue Book: Analysis and Forecast of China's Social Situation in 2014". At the same time, the relevant research reports submitted have been approved by the main leaders of Shanghai, Zhengzhou, Changchun and Guangzhou. A nationwide social quality survey began in 2013. The "2013 Comprehensive Survey on China's Social Conditions" (CSS2013) hosted by the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is themed "Social Quality and the Chinese Dream"; The "2015 Comprehensive Survey of China's Social Conditions" (CSS2015) takes "China's Social Quality Status" as the overall research theme. In both surveys, household surveys were conducted in 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions across the country, and more than 10,000 questionnaires were obtained each. Based on the data of CSS2015, the research group of the Institute of Sociology wrote the "Survey of the Current Social Quality in China" and published it in the "Social Blue Book: Analysis and Forecast of China's Social Situation in 2016". Since then, the "Comprehensive Survey of China's Social Conditions", which has been continuously carried out as a long-term study, has set social quality as a fixed module, and there is a continuous data resource for social quality measurement and evaluation at the national level. As far as the team of the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is concerned, the localization research work on social quality theory and indicator system includes the following contents. First, qualitative research on the topic of social quality was carried out. From February to March 2015, the research group held three focus group symposiums in Beijing, attended by 24 participants. The focus group discussion asked the participants about the specific content in each dimension of social quality, and learned about their cognitive understanding, knowledge scope and specific expression content, so as to examine the degree of localization in the conceptualization and operation of social quality. Second, the social quality index system has been adjusted. In the module of economic and social security, the measurement content of household income and expenditure is detailed, and the public's satisfaction with the current social security enjoyment, the satisfaction of the (non-farm) employment situation, and the public's performance evaluation of local governments in social security, employment, compulsory education and other aspects are added. Indicators in the European system of social quality indicators that do not correspond to the actual situation in our country or for which data are difficult to obtain have been removed, such as "subjective perception of political stability, armed conflict and terrorist attacks" and "length of time for employers to notify employees before terminating employment contracts". In the social cohesion module, priority selection, normative orientation, social value measurement of social integration, and public evaluation of the morality, law-abiding, and belief status of the current society are added. The question of the European Social Quality Indicators relating to the willingness to pay taxes in order to improve the situation of the poor and the elderly has been removed. In the social inclusion module, combined with the actual situation in China, premarital cohabitants, homosexuals, beggars, ex-prisoners, people with different religious beliefs and AIDS patients are identified as marginalized groups to examine the degree of public acceptance of them; Added measurement of social fairness. The content of women's participation in senior management of government/social organizations/enterprises in the original indicator system, as well as topics related to social care, have been deleted. In the social empowerment module, the content of politics and public participation (elections, political discussions, reflecting social issues, collective action) is detailed, and the measurement of political efficacy is added. The relevant indicators of the "work-family life coordination policy", which was commonly used in Western European countries in the original indicator system, were excluded. Finally, the respondents who passed the indicator and questionnaire questions were tested for their cognition. In late April 2015, the research team designed the first draft of the questionnaire and conducted cognitive tests among Beijing residents, completing a total of 65 questionnaires. The 45 social work masters who participated in the survey submitted cognitive test reports, which provided valuable references for questionnaire design. Through the above-mentioned qualitative and quantitative research, the "Chinese Social Quality Index System" designed by the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has taken shape, mainly involving 4 basic dimensions, 15 second-level indicators, and more than 80 third-level indicators (see Chapter 2, Section 1 of this book for details). Of course, the sinicization of the social quality index system is still in the experimental stage, and there is still great room for improvement. Domestic scholars have pointed out that the social quality index system is more applicable to China's urban areas, especially large and medium-sized cities, and its applicability to the vast rural area is still relatively lacking. For example, our study finds that there is a certain negative correlation between the two modules of social cohesion and social inclusion, which poses new challenges for the comprehensive synthesis of indicators. The survey data in this book is mainly from the "2017 Comprehensive Survey on China's Social Conditions" (CSS2017) conducted by the Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which is also the third phase of the survey on the quality of Chinese society. At the same time, the data of the first two surveys are also partially introduced in the book so that longitudinal comparisons of the quality of society can be made. This book was written by 4 researchers and 9 doctoral and master's students from the research team of the Institute of Sociology. Each chapter is written by: Chapter 1: A Review of Social Quality Theory. Contributors: Cui Yan and He Linglong Chapter 2: Social Quality Survey and Data. Contributors: Ren Liying, Jia Cong, Zhang Bin Chapter 3: Household Income and Consumption. Contributors: Ren Liying and Zhang Caixing Chapter 4: Housing and Social Security Status. Contributors: Wei Li and Qi Li Chapter 5: Employment and Education. Written by: Cui Yan and Heather Chapter 6: Social Cohesion Report. Written by: Zou Yuchun and Liu Chang Chapter 7: Social Inclusion Report. Written by: Cui Yan and Huang Yongliang Chapter 8: Social Empowerment Report. Contributors: Zou Yuchun and Chen Yihua Chapter 9: Comprehensive Assessment of Social Quality. Contributors: Cui Yan, Jia Cong. Among them, Associate Researcher Cui Yan provided the writing outline for the whole book, Associate Researcher Ren Liying provided a unified data version for the writing of this book, and Associate Researcher Zou Yuchun and Associate Researcher Cui Yan were responsible for the whole book. In addition, the data of the previous social quality surveys carried out by the Institute of Sociology have also been released on the "China Social Quality Basic Database Platform" (https://cssdata.zkey.cc), the "Comprehensive Survey of China's Social Conditions" website (https://css.cssn.cn), and the WeChat public account "CSS Survey of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences", which are open to the public. Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the National Social Science Foundation of China, the Peak Program of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Comprehensive Integration Laboratory of Social Development Indicators of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences-Shanghai Research Institute and other institutions and research program funders for their support in China's social quality research. Li Wei, March 2019（AI翻译）